Mafia, toxic waste and a deadly cover up in an Italian paradise: 'They've poisoned our land and stolen our children'

A few days before I visited the rather scruffy Hospital of Saint Anna and Saint Sebastian in Caserta, southern Italy, a boy aged 11 arrived complaining of headaches. Doctors feared the worst – and sure enough, he was rapidly diagnosed as another child with brain cancer.

Some of these young patients arrive in agonising pain, others mystified by falling over all the time; they do not know that lethal tumours are swelling up inside their heads.

Yet more turn up with cancer in their blood, their bones, their bladders. There are so many cases that not all can be treated in the hospitals of Campania, a largely rural region.

Dr Alfredo Mazza believes this is only the beginning of problems caused by the toxic wasteCredit:
Nadia Shira Cohen

In a town where doctors would rarely come across a child with cancer, let alone brain cancer, they now see these traumatic cases crop up almost every month. Too many young patients are ending up dead, some barely out of the womb, their bodies riddled with disease.

Then there are women getting breast cancer unusually early, men who have developed lung cancer despite never having smoked, and children born with Down’s Syndrome to comparatively young mothers.

So why is this happening in an area north of Naples, now known as the ‘Triangle of Death’?

Death in paradise

The answer, locals believe, can almost certainly be found in places such as an old quarry by the historic town of Maddaloni, which I visited with an energetic 57-year-old youth worker named Enzo Tosti.

As we drove there, he told me he is having treatment to counter high levels of dioxins (highly toxic environmental pollutants) found in his blood five months earlier.

‘My wife works for the hospital as a radiologist and she is very concerned,’ he said. ‘I thought about leaving and going to live somewhere else but where would I go? This is my land.’

It was a glorious evening after a rain-sodden day, golden sun dipping through lavender-streaked skies as we turned off the main road and passed an orange grove, then fields full of fledgling bean plants.

Too many young patients are ending up dead, some barely out of the womb, their bodies riddled with disease

It was easy to understand his attachment to this striking area of Italy, some of the most fertile land in Europe thanks to the eruptions of Vesuvius to the south.

But for all the natural beauty, the scenes confronting me could not have been more depressing. As we clambered from the car, Tosti clamped his hand over his mouth and told me to hurry.

Italy’s Campania region is known for its natural beauty and food productionCredit:
Alamy

Rubbish lay everywhere, with plastic sacks, paint containers and glass bottles littering the ground. I stumbled over the undulating, pockmarked land, struggling to keep up with my guide.

Descending a dip we were struck by the acrid stench of chemicals and saw a small plume of smoke seeping from the earth.

Toxic waste and 'vile chemical smells'

Tosti explained that the Mafia dumped huge quantities of contaminated industrial waste there, then obtained backdated permission for their actions.

These hazardous materials were left on prime agricultural land, next to a car dealership, with bingo halls and furniture stores nearby, and just a few hundreds yards from a town of 39,000 people.

A criminal investigation was launched 18 months ago, but local people do not expect convictions. This was far from an isolated incident.

There are thousands of similar dumps all over this once-paradisiacal slice of Italy: in canals and caves, in quarries and wells, under fields and hills, beneath roads and properties.

Trucks would turn up at night, waste would be emptied, then huge fires started. Locals lined doors with damp towels to keep out the vile chemical smells

For many years businesses in the prosperous north of the country paid organised crime to dispose of toxic waste illegally rather than pay far higher rates to have it dealt with safely. So the Camorra Mafia contaminated great chunks of its own backyard, littering the landscape with heavy metals, solvents and chlorinated compounds.

Barrels were buried, containers driven into rivers, hazardous materials mixed in with household rubbish, chemical sludge spread on fields as ‘fertiliser’, asbestos burnt in open air. And only now is the tragic legacy of the Mafia’s idiocy finally becoming clear. But it is not just the Mafia.

Toxic fires burnt day and night around the countrysideCredit:
Nadia Shira Cohen

The story of this illegal waste disposal stains Italy. It reveals the dark side of capitalism, with allegations of state complicity, cover-ups by police, politicians and prosecutors.

One Mafia kingpin even claimed trucks drove from Germany carrying nuclear waste to dumps in Campania.

Catalyst for catastrophe

Doctors and scientists believe this polluted Italian landscape provides a perfect experiment in ‘exposomics’ – the evolving study of health damage caused by exposure to harmful chemicals in environmental contamination.

The saga’s roots can be traced back to a devastating Italian earthquake that left almost 3,000 people dead and 280,000 homeless in November 1980.

Billions of pounds in aid poured in, although most ended up in the wrong pockets. Rebuilding the ruined roads and buildings boosted Mafia profits, since they dominated construction in the region – a handy way to launder profits from drugs and prostitution.

As cash flowed in, the clans expanded interests into areas such as quarrying, which provided raw materials for their work.

Then an enterprising businessman with gangland links who owned several waste dumps realised big money could be made hiding industrial waste amid domestic detritus.

So in the late 1980s, the Mafia moved into a lucrative new business. Soon farmers began to notice that the new liquid fertiliser they had been given was so strong that it corroded metal tanks, leaked from lorries and stunted plants.

Deadliest of cover ups

One day a forestry official in Brescia gave a young journalist named Enrico Fontana a vial of this fertiliser; the reporter recoiled at the bitter stench since it contained cyanide. So in 1990 he published two exposés in L’Espresso, a prominent news weekly, disclosing that organised crime was dumping dangerous materials on fields and in landfill sites.

Evidence to support his claims slowly began to mount. A Mafia supergrass called Nunzio Perrella told investigators in Naples about the new trade, leading to scores of arrests of gangsters and corrupt officials in March 1993. They were soon free, however.

Watch | Footage shows Italian police breaking up mafia drug ring

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The following year Fontana – now working for Legambiente, an environmental group – published a report called Garbage Inc, revealing the same people trafficking illegal waste in other parts of Italy.

There was a public outcry, a parliamentary commission, and polluted parts of Campania were declared an officially degraded zone. ‘We thought we had a result. Our job was done,’ Fontana told me as we sat drinking coffee outside Legambiente’s Rome headquarters.

‘But then nothing happened. Nothing. What was missing was that we did not put together legal dumping with illegal dumping. And while it was obvious this was bad for the land, we did not notice any health outcomes at that stage since they are not obvious immediately.’

Supergrass and the land of fires

Fontana coined the phrase ‘eco-mafia’ and began issuing annual reports into their actions. He was unaware of two other important developments.

First, a police officer in Campania named Roberto Mancini stumbled on the Mafia’s new activities, discovering they were hiding toxic waste from businesses in the industrial north among local household waste poured into landfill sites in the south.

Anna Magri talks about her son Riccardo, who battled with leukemia from six months old. He died shortly before his second birthday Credit:
Nadia Shira Cohen

He wrote a memo for his superiors detailing his findings. But the report was buried and Mancini later transferred to Rome. With cruel irony, Mancini died two years ago from cancer.

Then came the case of Carmine Schiavone, one of the most important supergrasses in Italian history. As a leader of the notorious Casalesi clan in Naples, he confessed to losing count of the number of people killed on his orders.

His explosive testimonies revealed widespread bribery of politicians and eventually put 16 crime bosses behind bars for life after trials that dragged on for years and left five witnesses dead.

Secret dumping operations at the dead of night

Schiavone claimed to have broken the Mafia code of silence out of fears for the environment. His disclosures were given in private to a 1997 parliamentary committee in Rome about toxic waste dumping – then, astonishingly, kept secret for almost 17 years.

‘We are talking about millions of tonnes,’ Schiavone told the committee.

He described dumping operations taking place at dead of night, guarded by men in military uniforms and with the connivance of senior police officers, politicians and business people.

The supergrass showed state officials the locations of sites because, he predicted with startling accuracy, nearby residents would be ‘dying of cancer within 20 years’.

Birth defects, cancers and tax dodgers

This illegal trade was a by-product of tax dodging in a country with one of the highest levels of evasion in western Europe. Businesses massaging their income had to mask the scale of their activities – and that meant hiding huge amounts of hazardous waste.

By the turn of the century, so much was being dumped in Campania it could not be hidden easily in rubbish dumps, so the Mafia began burning it.

Among them was Alfredo Mazza, a lively Neapolitan training to become a cardiologist. Mazza requested cancer data from health authorities in an eastern region of Campania with high levels of dumping – and the results showed evidence of links between environmental degradation and rising incidence of tumours.

A dead bird illustrates the devastating effect on wildlife, as well as human lifeCredit:
Nadia Shira Cohen

Male death rates from bladder and liver cancer were about twice national levels in this rural district, and female mortality from liver cancer more than three times the Italian average.

And while improved diagnosis and treatment were boosting survival rates elsewhere, local medics were seeing not only rising mortality but younger patients.

‘The age was important,’ he said. ‘Cancer is usually found in older people but these were younger people dying.’

The pugnacious young doctor took the data to a local prosecutor, demanding action, but was fobbed off. So he wrote to The Lancet, which published his landmark work in September 2004.

The article provoked a furore, fuelling local protests over a planned new incinerator, yet led to little real action from the authorities – although Mazza told me he learnt later from a friend that Italian intelligence began monitoring him as a ‘troublemaker’.

Truth about hazardouz waste

Now an established heart consultant who has published further studies into the consequences of hazardous waste, Mazza admits it is impossible to prove precise links between toxic materials, tumours and congenital malformations. But he believes they are only just beginning to see the full scale of health problems.

‘We are living in the Triangle of Death. We do not know how many areas are affected, how bad the damage will be or how long it will last.’

Leopoldo Esposito, a local environmental activist looks upon waste which pours into the Regi Lagni Canals of Marigliano Credit:
Nadia Shira Cohen

Two years after the Lancet report, tales of gangsters driving across Italy to dump toxic waste in rivers and bury contaminated containers under lush fields reached a wider audience with the book Gomorrah by journalist Roberto Saviano.

Cancer in young people - a surge in cases

Among the six million people who bought the book was an oncologist in Naples named Antonio Marfella, who had long been baffled by both his increasing number of patients and their decreasing age.

Marfella, who was then head consultant at Fondazione Pascale Napoli, a 235-bed hospital that is the region’s only cancer centre, said they started seeing the surge in cases around the year 2000, with the average patient age plummeting from 60 to under 40.

Suddenly once-rare bone cancer cases became commonplace in children and the age of most breast cancer patients fell below 40. ‘Although we are a city on the sea and not industrial, it was like we were living in one of the world’s worst industrialised areas,’ he said.

Naples had long had been infamous for inept management of its rubbish. Suddenly the white-haired consultant understood what was going on around him: ‘It opened up a vision that seemed unbelievable,’ he said. ‘We knew there was mismanagement of household waste but we did not know organised crime had gone outside its usual activities of drug dealing and prostitution into hazardous waste.’

Agriculture, the environment and endless fires

In the nearby town of Acerra, sheep were being born deformed and dying soon after. Then in 2007 a 50-year-old shepherd turned up at the hospital with such aggressive cancer riddling his bones and blood that doctors could not determine where it had started; one month later he was dead.

His daughter asked for tests on his body, which revealed high levels of dioxins. After it emerged his sheep had been tested four times with similarly disturbing results, she launched a court case for damages. Marfella gave expert evidence in court, which led to a request to speak at the Italian parliament early the following year.

‘I said there were the same levels of toxins in these agricultural areas as were found in industrial sites, which was a paradox.’ He was demoted on his return from Rome for being ‘alarmist’. Around this time Anna Magri gave birth to Riccardo, her second son.

When I met the 39-year-old car retailer in her neat flat in a village near Caserta, the boy’s tiny shoes were displayed alongside his picture on a dresser: he died shortly before his second birthday, having spent most of his short life fighting the leukaemia that was discovered when he was six months old.

‘We thought he was teething, which was why he was so upset, crying all the time. I was breastfeeding him but I could not pick him up because he would scream. He was in so much pain,’ said his mother.

We are living in the Triangle of Death. We do not know how many areas are affected, how bad the damage will be or how long it will lastAlfredo Mazza

Magri, who was pregnant during a 2007 crisis caused by overflowing dumps, remembers thick black smoke rising over her village from waste set alight on a nearby hill. ‘I had seen fires all over the place but now I know what they were. I am convinced his death was due to the toxic waste when it was burning, with all the illegal dumping.’

Hunt for answers

The exact cause of her son’s death will never be established. One study, however, indicated significantly higher levels of dioxins in breast milk from mothers in the worst-affected area than from others living in surrounding areas.

Other research has found animal milk containing worrying concentrations of dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs – man-made compounds once used widely in electrical products that are now banned in many countries), even in that of the buffalos used to produce the region’s famous mozzarella cheese.

In 2004 there were more than twice as many known dumping sites in Campania as in the northern region of Lombardy; four years later, this number had more than doubled.

The fires burnt, but officials ignored them. One paediatrician showed me a map of these microdumps, each one a black dot and heavily clustered in the ‘Triangle of Death’ zone around Acerra, Nola and Marigliano.

Then he showed me another he had made with red dots denoting cases of child brain cancer overlaid on top; almost all overlapped in the same small area.

Only now is the full extent of the scandal coming to light. Partly this is thanks to a campaigning local priest named Reverend Maurizio Patriciello, who writes for Avvenire, a newspaper for Italian bishops, and enjoys stirring things up on social media.

Power of social media

One hot night in June 2012 he could not sleep because of the smoke and stench of burning chemical waste, so went on Facebook at 3am and asked if others were suffering. By 6am he had more than 1,000 responses from neighbouring villages, so went to his bishop and demanded action.

‘Families here are terrified,’ the silver-haired Catholic priest told me when we met in his church on a grim estate, watched intently by a gang of hooded men outside the heavy iron gates. ‘They have to go for treatment in the north because hospitals here are full.’

They have poisoned our land and stolen our children

Patriciello helped grieving parents form protest groups, lobbied politicians in Rome, penned polemical articles, organised huge marches and joined with campaigners who sent pictures of mothers with their dead children to the Pope and Italian president.

He even met Schiavone before the supergrass died two years ago. The priest claims the gangster confessed his crimes but said the worst offenders were industrialists dealing with the Mafia since they knew the devastating damage from their deeds. It is hard to disagree.

It also emerged two years ago that the United States navy, whose European command is based in Naples, had conducted its own three-year, $30m study into local air, soil and water.

It tested hundreds of contaminated or alarming locations, finding ‘unacceptable health risks’ in private wells and worrying levels of uranium in five per cent of samples.

It found no impact on military personnel but three areas near its base were placed off-limits, tap water banned and troops advised to avoid ground- floor accommodation, where risk of inhaling contaminants was highest.

Cleaning, justice and parliament

Thanks to the campaigners and hefty European Union fines for failing to combat illegal waste disposal, Italy’s politicians were finally prodded into action. Farming was banned around some contaminated sites. Then they passed a special ‘Land of Fires’ act of parliament in 2014, which banned burning of waste and put extra cash into cancer detection and public health promotion in the region.

It also ordered the National Institute of Health to collect epidemiological evidence. An earlier study by the body had found a correlation between hazardous waste and health outcomes such as cancer mortality and birth malformations, but no direct cause.

Still waste water and abandoned trash outside of La Reggia, a giant trash dump known for years of abusive waste dumpingCredit:
Nadia Shira Cohen

The results of the inquiry, which looked into mortality, cancer incidence and hospital admissions in 55 municipalities, emerged earlier this year – and were devastating.

Life expectancy in Campania is two years lower than in the rest of Italy, with 2,000 excess deaths estimated over a 15-year period. Mortality rates in the ‘Triangle of Death’ are 10 per cent higher for men than elsewhere in the region, 13 per cent higher for women.

'They have poisoned our land and stolen our children'

There has been a 17 per cent rise in cancers of the central nervous system for children under 14 around Naples. And a 51 per cent rise for infants in their first year. ‘It is not that every case is down to the toxic waste but you can see a clear pattern,’ said Pietro Comba, one of the authors of a report.

‘There were particular signs with stomach, liver and lung cancer, plus breast cancer in women. And it was significant these excesses are not uniform across the region.’ These findings add to a growing body of evidence linking pollution to health problems.

Life expectancy in Campania is two years lower than in the rest of Italy, with 2,000 excess deaths estimated over a 15-year period

Slowly but surely, Italy is moving to clean up these dumps, although as yet there have been few prosecutions and campaigners are pessimistic that key perpetrators will ever meet justice.

‘These people will never come to court because they are important industrialists,’ said Marzia Caccioppoli, 40, a seamstress whose only child died three years ago of a type of brain cancer usually seen as the result of exposure to harmful radiation in adults.

‘They have poisoned our land and stolen our children.’ When I visited the Hospital of Saint Anna and Saint Sebastian in Caserta, I met a paediatrician named Gaetano Rivezzi, a doctor for three decades, born in a village seven miles away. He was the man who showed me the disturbing maps overlaying child cancer cases on dump sites.

‘Before it was paradise here – there were one thousand things you could grow.

‘Campania is a laboratory to understand the link between the environment and health. The damage can’t be undone but it is important and we must learn from this.’

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on mosaicscience.com and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence